Then it comes down to: what is death? At least within the Sinfest world, what is death?

I think the point Hertical Rants is making is that the bots, the AI life forms, have an existence that can be separated from the corporeal body (the "chassis" as it has been put) and put in a different body. The body may be destroyed but the sentient portion, encoded in a chip or whathaveyou, continues. It can even be transmitted to multiple bodies, as it has been with the Assassin Bot (though the Sunday installment might possibly suggest, as the Assassins fell out of lockstep and battled the droids, that some dawning individualization due to separate experiences may be taking place).

All right, then. Besides AI life, there is also organic life (humans and sentient nonhuman animals), and -- what shall we call them? Gods? Demigods? If the latter are immortal, the question of death doesn't matter -- with the notable exception of Time, who dies annually and is replaced by (or reincarnated into) the infant New Year. So for the organic beings, what is death?

Well... again it's the separation of the sentient portion -- the "soul" let us suppose -- from the corporeal body. While the existence of souls may be up in the air in our own world, we've seen them tortured enough in Hell to know they exist in the Sinfest universe. The sentient part ("soul") exists after the corporeal part is destroyed.

How is that different from AI death? The fact that AI sentience can be easily transmitted to a new corporeal form? For organic beings, that would be reincarnation -- not so simple, and traditionally not spread across multiple bodies (though that might be interesting...). (Question: Has reincarnation been established in the Sinfest world?)

Then how do we define death in the context of Sinfest? If we define it as "corporeal body is destroyed, sentient portion continues," then there is AI death, which has been seen in the comic. That the sentient portion exists after the body is destroyed doesn't negate the "death" part -- unless we also say that the continuation of the soul for organic beings negates death, also. Well... Theologians might argue that point.

If humans have immortal souls that preserve their thoughts, memories, consciousness, etc then humans don't die. Full stop. No argument. I refuse to use a definition of death that describes things otherwise.

This doesn't apply to the real world, but it does apply to Sinfest.

In Sinfest we observe humans (and anthropomorphic pigs) falling down hellholes. In Sinfest you can visit a human whose body has been destroyed simply by digging a ten foot deep hole in the ground. The closest thing the strip has to a main character has returned from hell alive and well simply by receiving a get-out-of-hell-free card from his friend. Devil people who work the hellpits have their own ghettos on the surface. ... though I've always found it quite strange that they would be so marginalized on the surface when Big D is in charge everything. Guess Sinfest isn't internally consistent.

Even a long-term torturee (the Storytime Zombie) returned to the surface after years of torment.

SA_Penguin wrote:

words

You're comparing what I said to the "just a nigger" line from Huckleberry Finn? Fucking seriously?

It was a continuation of previous comments I've made in other threads. At one point it seemed like Assassin Bot had died, making Milton the only person to have actually killed anyone in all of the Sinfest universe, seeing as humans don't actually die in Sinfest.

This would have made Milton the only murderer.

but now not only has she survived, there's more of her_________________butts

oh, and in this particular case I never clicked the "quote" button. I typed the tags out myself. It took somewhat less effort than hunting down the actual block of text and copy-pasting it into my post._________________butts

It's worth noting that, as seen here, destroying/deactivating/disassembling a fembot's "chassis" seems to be terminal for the personality inside. All we see is Pxsomethingsomething accessing her sister's memories. And with the whole thing titled as "Domestic Violence", It's a bit more clear that regarding fembots as disposable is very much Not OK.

Has it been shown that the new "batch" of assassin bots have literally been uploaded with the consciousness of the destroyed one though? Because I assumed they'd just been shown her memories, maybe some Sisterhood stuff, and decided their course of action from there.

No, all we saw was the chip being used as part of Clio's hack. I think that the mechanic in Sinfest-world is that you can upload/share memories, but the consciousness is gone when you kill the bot. Otherwise, when Pxsomethingsomething viewed the memories of her destroyed sister in the Domestic Violence strip, it would have been a conversation with the surviving intelligence, not just a viewing of her memories. Probably something similar would have happened with Clio and the chip from the weaponised fembot; had any personality survived, there would have been a conversation, not just an exploration of her memories and final recorded thought.

If everything's on one chip, the chances of having the "final recorded memory" or whatever survive, but not the rest, are infinitesimal. I won't accept such a massive contrivance unless it's explicitly stated in-comic, and even then I'll be annoyed._________________butts